The present invention generally concerns heat conservation devices for clothes dryers and more particularly an exhaust air diversion device with lint scrubber apparatus adapted to be positioned in the exhaust air vent pipe of a clothes dryer for diverting warm, humid exhaust air from the dryer into the interior environment of a home.
Electric and gas heated clothes dryers have become common household appliances during the past several decades for drying clothes inside homes after washing. These dryers essentially operate by tumbling the wet clothes in a large revolving cylinder or drum while forcing hot air through the cylinder to pick up the moisture from the clothes and carry it out of the dryer. It is conventional to vent or exhaust the warm, humid air to the outside of the house.
In recent years, however, the rapid rise in energy costs for homeowners has made the practice of venting or exhausting the hot air from a clothes dryer to the outside a conspicous waste of energy resulting from loss of heat as well as humidity which could be utilized at least to some extent in the environment inside the home. The practice of venting this air outside is particularly inefficient in the winter months when it is quite common, in fact necessary in many geographical locations, to concurrently use furnaces for heating and humidifiers for adding humidity to the air in the inside environment in the home at the same time the warm, humid air from the clothes dryer is being exhausted to the outside.
There are several problems associated with simply venting the exhaust from the dryer directly into the inside environment of the home which have resulted in the conventional practice of venting or exhausting the air to the outside. One of the problems is that the exhaust air from the dryer contains a certain amount of lint which is picked up from the clothes. Even though most dryers include some provisions for lint traps or screens, none of these conventional devices supplied by the manufacturers are efficient enough to eliminate all the lint in the exhaust air, and projecting the lint into the inside environment of the home is quite undesirable from both health and a practical cleaning standpoint. Another problem of course is the inability to regulate the heat and humidity to desirable levels during the several seasons of the year if the exhaust is simply vented directly into the inside environment.